Theres SEO, But what about SMO?

SMO you may be asking yourself, what is that? Social Media Optimization and at the end of the day it has the same goals as SEO, Increase Traffic!

Now if you have been living under a rock and you’re asking yourself, what is Social Media and how does it or can it affect your business? Well Search Engine Watch defines social media as a category of sites that is based on user participation and user-generated content. They include social networking sites like LinkedIn or Facebook, social bookmarking sites like Del.icio.us, social news sites like Digg or Reddit, and other sites that are centered on user interaction. And how can it affect your business? Well let’s start with an increase in revenue. Social Media can be an effective marketing channel when used properly.

Where does it all take place? Look at the rapid growth of the internet and how people interact, using message boards, chat forums, podcasts, wikis and blogs. Literally, there are dozens of such sites that are available over the Internet today which include Digg, Del.icio.us, Technoratti, Orkut, Wikipedia, Twitter and Facebook just to name a few.

Now before you jump into the world of Social Media you need to determine what you’re doing?

1. What are your goals?

2. What is your target?

3. Where and How will you execute?

You should know what you want out of social media and if it’s for business purposes, what your target is and finally how will you get there. A poorly executed Social Media endeavor could be costly for your business. People talk and the conversation is global.

What to do? You need eyes on your next big thing!

1. Are you blogging, this will increase your sites linkability: Increasing the linkability will make your site easier for the social media websites or outside parties to link with your content. An easy way of generating increased activity is through blogging and creating content that would be of use to potential clients or existing clients. If you do not like to do this, you can maintain content rich articles, free white papers and resource page containing lot of useful links at a single place. These are some of the greatest ways to increase linkability of your site.

2. Make social tagging or bookmarking easy: Adding a bookmark button is one of the popular ways but you need to go ahead of this and include text link in the bottom of your post. This kind of format is seen to be extremely effective in generating votes for the content you have posted. If they like it they’ll share it.

3. Start participating: You can join a conversation on many websites or create the conversation on your own site. Start blogging, getting involved and becoming part of the conversation.

4. Remain active, build an audience and keep up the work. Social Media Optimization when done right can produce fantastic results for you and your business.

Social media optimization can be extremely valuable if planned and applied correctly.

One of my lovely crack pot followers pointed out this post after I published. Great blog post here on the 5 rules of Social Media (increased to 16 by contributors) by Rohit Bhargava. Give it a read, its a great post, Kind of blows mine outta the water.

Comments

Is that actually their definition of social media? That’s ridiculous. That’s like saying the definition of transportation is “vehicle.”

Social media is not its tools. Social media is a space and a mind-set, not a list of social networks.

PLUS the goal of SEO should not be to “increase traffic”. It should be to increase sales/conversions/awareness. While there may often be a causal relationship between them, simply increasing traffic isn’t the end goal. Sending qualified, interested people to your site will probably lead to you realizing your real goal, but it’s not the goal in itself.

If I client told me their goal was just to “increase traffic” then I could say, “okay, let’s start spamming some people.” Let’s try to trick as many people as possible into stumbling upon your site as we can.

Of course that sort of thing would get me fired. SEO and this “SMO” should be focused on getting the *right people* engaged with your product/brand. Not just about getting eyeballs on the page. That’s a terrible goal.

However, if a company is approaching social media by thinking that it’s the sum of a few websites, then that might just be their goal anyway…

Robert
October 24, 2008

There were a number of definitions and most seemed to vary quite a bit, I just went with one for the purposes of a definition for the blog entry.

In regards to tools they are basically the facilitator of social media, without the tools there would be no conversation.

I guess I should have gone further into “increase traffic”. If your increasing the number of eyes looking at your product or service then at the end of the day sales should be up.

And to round things out I merely took a selection of sites and by no means is that a complete list. If I had to publish a list of all I’d have a search engine.

From a strictly digital standpoint, sure, those would be some the tools. But Apple zealots spreading the gospel of Jobs to their coworkers are participating in social media, in my opinion. And that doesn’t require Facebook.

I think my transportation/vehicle analogy holds. If I asked you to define how transportation worked you wouldn’t start by saying, “well, the internal combustion engine…” I’m merely saying that social media is bigger than its tools, and defining it by only listing the tools that facilitate it doesn’t make sense to me.

Robert
October 24, 2008

I think its safe to say that there will never really be one definition as social media can take on numerous forms. So essentially I agree with you. Next time I’ll put a little more thought and more than 20 minutes into my non negative blog posts…lol

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